


Living Around The Flames At Night

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Category: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Genre: Campfires, Gen, POV First Person, Rumors, Storytelling, Tall Tales
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-22
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 05:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11548563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: A collection of (questionable) stories and tales from stalkers all around the Zone.





	1. Trophies

**Author's Note:**

> These are just things that come to me as I'm playing the game, but that I don't think need to be worked into a greater narrative. This is in the Call of Chernobyl mod with the Misery addon.

 

So, you guys wanna hear this one? It’s true, I’m telling you, this was something I actually saw and did.

Alright. So - few months back, I used to be hanging around Agroprom then. A few good stashes to look for, plenty of mutants to harvest. Yeah, yeah, don’t give me those looks, of course I’m one of the guys who gets off on shooting army patrols when they swung by to hassle us.

So anyway, I was digging around by that old train tunnel, you know the one. And I saw this _thing,_ right? Coming out of the tunnel. At first I think - dammit, a zombie. But it’s moving too normal for that. And then I see it’s another stalker. Alright, so, he may give me a hard time, but I have a Fora to introduce his face to if he gets too pissy. He gets a little closer, and I can see he’s all wrapped in fur. But it’s summer, so that doesn’t make too much sense.

I tell him - “How goes the hunt, bro?”

He fucking jumps! I guess he didn’t see me, but… he was in a dark tunnel, and I’m out in broad daylight on the track. His eyes are, well, crazy. I don’t have words for it. I guess he realized I wasn’t going to attack unless he throws the first punch, so he nodded.

“Well, it goes. You know. I think I have most of them.”

I can see his face now, he’s one of them old-timers.

“Most of what, _starik?_ ”

“Most of them. The… furs. Skins.”

Alright, that sort of makes sense, I guess. And I look closer, he’s just a couple meters from me now. He’s got a Sunrise under it, but his whole body is wrapped in mutant skins. Boar, pseudodog, flesh, bloodsucker, ’giant, chimera, burer, even controller! And the ones he didn’t skin, well, they’re trophies on his belt - zombie hand, the mask from a snork, cat and dog tails, tushkano head. And they’re all properly tanned and everything.

Then I see… he’s got a fucking human finger around his neck!

Alright, Sasha, don’t panic, there’s probably a reason why. So of course I ask him. And he tells me - that’s from a Monolith.

Okay, so by then I’d only heard of those maniacs. Just the stories. S _tarik_ explains, of course, that he’s been into Radar after the Scorcher got turned off. And the first Monolither he killed, he took this trophy from, because they’re not human no more. Which… alright. That makes me feel a little better. And, yeah, I’ve run into them Monolithers a few times by now, too. They’re not human no more, just like he said.

I ask if he wants to come rest up, you know, in the factory where we were camped. Stalkers come and go there all the time, it’s a bit of a hub there, you can chat or find jobs maybe. He just told me he was going home, and when I asked him, he said he lives in the swamps. Talks a little, and I figure it out. This place is way on the west edge, away from everything. Guy’s a hermit.

“Well, if you’re by yourself, do you just want your trophies to remember?” I asked him.

“No. There are some people. Um, I read about this, a very long time ago. After a kill, you wear part of the animal, to have its gifts. Do you understand, _sinok?_ So, from the _kravasos,_ I take his invisibility. From the _volk,_ I get his fierceness.”

“Alright, I think I get it. And from the Monolith?”

 _Starik_ thought about that one a little, and then he nodded to me again. “He is the most fearless. And now, so am I.”

Well, this encounter was more than a bit creepy for me, so I just wished him luck getting back home and went back to the factory myself. I forgot all about the stash I was looking for, too. I never saw this guy again, and some time later I did go to the swamps myself. Asked a couple _Chistoye Neba_ geeks about him, but they never saw the guy.

I wonder about this sometimes, though. This old guy, I got the idea he was in the Zone before it was the Zone. And he didn’t seem to be moving too fast, neither, you know? Maybe there was something to that theory of his. Could he just be lucky, or this all be in his head? Or is he right? Can you have such good luck for that long, here? And I’ve never heard about anything like this since.


	2. In Krasnaya Lis, Make Sure You Keep Your Head

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one just sort of popped into my head one morning, but I thought it would be similar to some of the tall tales in Marked One's PDA that you can read during SoC. Those got pretty weird, too.

 

So did you guys hear this one? I personally wasn’t there for it, but it’s so fucking weird that it may actually be true. No, I’m serious, don’t look at me like that. It is _fucking weird,_ man.

Okay. So some Freedom stalker, okay, he’s poking around out in _Krasnaya Lis_ and feeling pretty good about himself. That place is a radioactive hell-hole for sure, but so far, I guess, he’s doing a pretty good job. Just looking for stashes, offed a couple Monolithers, skinned a couple psi-dogs. And boom - log on the ground with a little hollow in it, which could possibly contain more _habar_ for the inquisitive stalker.

And so, you know, this guy’s not stupid. He makes sure there ain’t nobody around but him, checks his meter so he’s not catching rays while in this spot. It’s all good, his luck is holding. And so then looks in the stash.

A fucking severed head!

For real, a human head. Fresh enough, I guess, it’s not rotten yet or anything. This is fucking gross, of course, but he thinks that, well, maybe there’s something to this. So he pulls it out of the hollow and looks at it.

And then there’s suddenly… okay, you won’t believe me, and I didn’t believe this at first either, but I heard this from two different guys on two different days when I was trading with Freedom. There’s suddenly this fucking chimera, actually a little small like it’s young or something. Just standing there, not like the fucking things usually act. Looking at the head he’s holding. So then… he’s about to piss himself, of course, and y’know I probably would too. Drops the head because he’s just frozen, it’s too scary and he just _knows_ he’s about to die.

So this chimera takes two steps over, enough to get close, swallows the head in one bite and then just leaves.

Okay, so what the fuck is this? The poor guy has no idea what just fucking happened. Forgets all about looking for more stashes, cuts his little expedition short and just runs like fuck for home. None of the guys back in the Freedom base believe a word of it, and he wants to prove it, right, but has no idea how to do that because he’s totally clueless about the whole thing that just happened. Eventually two of his buddies agree that if he takes them there and shows them, and they can see the proof, they’ll back him up. Actually these were the two guys I heard about it from later, too.

So, okay, they go into the Forest again about a week later because that was the time they took for preparing. The two guys wait from some distance, one to use the binoculars and one to cover his ass. The guy looks around in the log, and what do you fucking know, a new head is in there, and soon as he pulls it out the chimera appears and just waits quietly to be fed. The guy sets it down - boom, mutant walks over, eats it, goes on its way. By now his friends are convinced, but they think it’s as fucking weird as he does.

They all talk after that. Okay, they agree, they all want to know what the fuck this is, so they’ll camp out in one of the safer spots and see what happens the next morning. And they do it again, just like that. The first guy goes to the log, while his two friends spot for him. Of course it’s morning, then. The log was empty when he looked, which, okay, maybe now he’ll see where the heads are coming from.

And then - through the binoculars - they see him drop his gun, very suddenly, to grab his head. For just a couple seconds. Then he just lays down and dies on the spot. And - a fucking controller appears! _Holding a head!_

So, the chimera shows up right after that. Controller feeds it the head, then cuts off the dead Freedom guy’s and sticks it in the log. Because then he can feed his pet later.

Stop laughing!


	3. The Day Rostok Stood Empty

 

This one is kind of creepy, or it was for me when it happened… wow, almost a year ago. Can’t believe I’ve survived this long out here…

Okay. So, have you ever tried to leave the Zone? First off, most guys, they don’t want to in the first place. Bet you guys don’t. I didn’t want to, really, but I needed to check on my mother. Second, if you try to leave, mostly you’ll maybe make it halfway to Dityatky from where you were when you decided to leave, or maybe two-thirds. And then you mind goes “fuck it, I ain’t leaving. I got too much stuff to do here!” Third, even it you do make it to the edge, you can still get caught by soldiers or eaten by dogs there. Hell, you could just end up lost and then starve to death.

So assuming you get through those three things, then you gotta actually  _ leave, _ and the few who get that far generally find themselves having cold feet at the last second. They don’t know the Big Land anymore, or their old friends. It’s scary, to be honest, putting your slave chains back on for the “real world” and trying to be the same man to your family that they remember before you left. But the thing is, you don’t know that man anymore, because he died the first time you  _ lived _ in the Zone. He stopped existing, and now there’s just you. The real you, the you who’s free.

But, okay, you heard this all before from other guys. So anyway, I got past all that and made it back to Zhitomir where my mother is. Because, well, she’s getting old. And I stay for two months. After that, I’ve gone off my head, I mean totally crazy. Why do I not wake up damp and cold in the morning? Why does my food not sometimes have worms in it? Why do the clouds not show the possibility of a blowout, and only give me this drizzling rain?

Not only that, but I just kept having this one dream, over and over. Every night, and then I would wake up, go back to sleep, and have the dream again. I’m on the road into Rostok, with a bunch of  _ habar _ in my pack. I’ll go to the bar, sell shit to Petrenko, report in to the general for my next assignment. But when I get inside, the whole place is just silent. There’s nobody. Not in the bar, not in the base. I’m all alone. And then I check my backpack, and now it’s empty, too, just like Rostok.

So finally I asked a psychologist about this, because I was feeling very crazy and just wanted it to stop. He, actually, had talked to a couple of other guys who’d been to the Zone. (This guy was in Kyiv, of course, not Zhitomir.) And he just said that I need to go back, and the nightmares will stop. Okay, I can do that. But my mother…?

He just told me, I think, the place I am isn’t where I’m supposed to be, and the reason I have to stay isn’t worth dog shit. More or less, not in those words, of course. Because my mother will still be sick without me, and I have no life in Zhitomir.

So here I am. Getting assignments from the higher-ups, hunting mutants, dicking with Freedom squads when I see them. And you know what, I still wake up damp, and the food still has worms, and sometimes I almost get caught out in emissions.

I love it!


	4. The Worst Thing In The Zone

 

I got asked one time by some rookie recruit what the worst thing I ever saw in the Zone was. Well, problem is I got more than one answer to that.

When I was just a greenhorn at the army blockpost in Cordon before I joined Duty, the first horrible thing was about two days into my rotation. You see we only ate canned food or MREs for breakfast because it gave the guys time to hunt for lunch and dinner. They’d bring boar, or flesh, but only rarely would they risk tangling with dogs. Because the dogs are in big packs, you see. Even two or three boars can’t surround you and rip chunks outta you, but a big pack of blind dogs…

But, on my second day, they brought back about ten of the fucking beasts. Of course these were some of the Spetsnaz who were on post with us, they could do things like this easy as blinking. Anyway. Being a rookie grunt, I got taken off my guard post to help get them ready for cooking. So me and two other rookie grunts were skinning them, cleaning them. Well, I came across this one dog that had a full stomach, and they told me about what to do then. We could use the guts and whatever they’d eaten as bait for more prey, you see. So I cut open the stomach.

There’s a human hand inside.

No, not zombie, or  _ izlom, _ or snork. This was a fucking human hand, wedding ring still on. Well, I just puked right then, all over this mess and myself. After that, though, when the sergeant had kicked my ass for being like a little girl, I knew what to expect and it didn’t scare me no more. But still, you know, that very first time when it really just hits you…

The  _ actual _ most horrible thing I seen is from a couple years back. I guess this whole faction I never heard of before this made a huge rush to the plant. These guys, you see, were like… if you crossed mercs and ecologists, I think, very secretive but not super dumb. Smart guys with guns. They were trying to understand the Zone, or something. Anyway. They all up and left from the swamp down south, and I guess all of them died, or most of them.

So, after this happened, and I mean  _ right _ after, some merc comes crawling into our base back when we were in Agroprom. His suit’s all shredded, gun is broken, bleeding out his ears. Okay, that’s horrible. I didn’t know ears  _ could _ bleed before this, and I seen plenty of scary and disgusting things in the Zone, but for some reason this one thing really got to me.

Well, the merc just grabs my leg and begs me for help, because I was on guard duty that day on the north gate. I help him into the base and Gromov comes to help him out. His gear’s worthless and he’s basically starved. We don’t even know how he made it all the way to us. This guy told us about that faction pushing up to Chernobyl, how things went down. I don’t remember most of the shit he told us just because I could only look at his ears, they were still bleeding. Well, this guy took some ridiculous number of rads and died that night, of course. We never thought anything different from that would happen anyway with him. But all I remember from this was that we pulled down his mask and his hood, and I saw that his ears bled.


End file.
